


Meet Behind the Dennys

by CatalystOfTheSoul



Category: Danny Phantom
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-13
Updated: 2020-04-13
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:47:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23639302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CatalystOfTheSoul/pseuds/CatalystOfTheSoul
Summary: PHIC PHITE 2020.“I am alive.” Phantom said quickly, remembering the way that man had spoken about ghosts. And he was very much definitely alive. Every bite of food made him feel hungrier--and not that hollow, empty echo of hunger that threaded the dread and distraught of a ghosts’ entire existence. He was really, actually hungry. The kind of thing that could be filled with a plate of smothered beans. He had breathed in the smell of too-much rain and little cedar blooms and fresh-cut grass. He even had wholly forgotten the wonder of sunlight until today, where he stood on a stoop for a full five minutes with his eyes closed, basking in the glory of morning. This is life.There was just one problem. It wasn’t his.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 38
Collections: Phic Phight!





	Meet Behind the Dennys

**Author's Note:**

> [[Ft prompt by rayghost: Danny is a ghost who became half-human after stumbling through a portal to the human world.]]

A heartbeat. Flush, solid flooring. The buzz of technology, the smell of a room. Things he had forgotten. The Phantom sat up slowly, unsure of his muscles, the body he occupied. _Body_. A heady rush of blood filled his head and stars filled his vision. His stomach(!) twisted, and he fought the urge to vomit on a tiled floor. 

A woman knelt over him. She kept saying something. Over, over, a name, he blinked, frowned, his name?

Certainly not.

Not that he knew what his name was supposed to be, really. But it was not that. He looked around the room, a very different situation from his last, which was suspended by his ankle in the trap of a hunting-ghost with a very unnecessarily large knife. Nice not being skinned alive. Weird room. What was it that happened right before he’d found himself on the ground? He couldn’t remember anything beyond a sound like popcorn bursting. He got to his feet, swayed and the human - oh there were two of them, helped to catch him. He slumped against them, frowning. 

“Are you okay?!”

Her panic finally got through. “I’m alive.” Phantom said with surprise in his throat, “I think.”

“Maybe we should call your parents.”

Phantom caught sight of himself in a distant mirror. He froze. Blue eyes. Black hair. He wanted to faint all over again, “my parents?”

“They’ll know what to do!”

“My parents?” Phantom repeated, the word foreign to him, “I don’t...uh,” 

"He's right, maybe we shouldn't tell them."

"What? Why not?"

"Don't they wanna like...dissect ghosts?"

“But Danny...” The girl said, “doesn't look so good.”

“I’m alive.” Phantom repeated, a flatline attempt at explanation. They didn’t seem to understand. He was ushered upstairs, to a room that he did not know, to a bed that he had never slept in. He was given ice for something that did not hurt, and was asked questions to which there was no answer. They told him to rest. They told him they would come back tomorrow.

He did not understand sleep or time, so when they left, he remained sitting upright on the bed. The ice pack melted slowly, dripping from his elbow, until all he held to his head was a somewhat damp towel. Phantom waited for the room to twist into a ghostly lair, for the illusion to end, for the world to shift back into the cold. Instead, the walls filled up with a soft orange glow. And he smelled a smell that he had not smelled for over five hundred years.

His nose, or this nose, the nose of the human he occupied like a puppet on a string, knew that smell. It made his stomach growl. He got to his feet, his legs wobbled. He determined to make it down, thinking of that shining room, with all the metal, and the big hazard-marked door that felt packed with energy. He only made it as far as a kitchen. There the smell overwhelmed. Not just food. _Them_.

He had seen humans before. They tended to scream and run on sight. Yet these were so unconcerned by his presence none of them even looked up when he entered the room. They were not running because they did not think he was dead. This he found concerning, but chose not to care. He walked to the oven, standing over a burst of heat that would usually unsettle a ghost of his stature, but he did not waver. His stomach rumbled.

“You look tired,” a plate entered his hands. It fell right through his fingers and shattered on the floor. “Really tired,” the girl continued, “are you going to clean that up, or?”

Phantom ignored her, and plucked what his nose undoubtedly told him was food right up out of the pan, and placed it in his mouth. His eyes widened. Salt. Meat. Fat. He closed his eyes, enduring a taste he thought would forever be a memory. “Bacon.” he said.

“You’re going to be late for school,” an older, wiser woman shooed him out of the way. She had a smell on her, like several different layers of ectoplasm. None of them were strong enough pulses to be a real signature, a human, but a strange one, “I’ll take care of this. Just get him to class, Jazz.”

“Come on, weirdo,” the girl who had offered him the plate ruffled his hair, “time to start high school.”

“Before you go!” A screen fell, and a man with intelligent eyes offered up a tin box that oozed an intensive vibration, and Phantom felt in the pit of his stomach that he had no desire to activate the bell-toll hiding inside of that box, “don’t let any ghosts get ya. Portal’s working. Who knows what’s got through that door.”

Portal. Ghosts. Phantom felt his feet grounded upon the floor. Luckily, his wasn’t the hand that took it, and the girl shoved the buzz-box in her backpack. His discomfort subsided. “What kind of ghosts do you think got out?”

“Bad ones,” the man replied, glowering back at his screen, “some real poltergeists out there.”

“Don’t you worry about that,” a plate swept into a dust pan, “your father and I are going to take care of everything. And if you spot anything, you just call us right away.” 

A pull on his arm, he was dragged out of the room. He recognized her red hair and slight features to be a difference in age. Phantom had died young, so he remembered youth best of all. This girl must be family, “what do you think?”

“I think we’re going to find out if ghosts even exist.” 

* * *

Phantom was accustomed to a world that constantly changed. He understood sudden fluctuations in atmosphere, mood, and even knew what it was like to be shuffled from one door to the next like a sheep with a dog. But nothing in the entirety of the Zone could have prepared him for the high school cafeteria. Cluster from hundreds of adolescence wandering around like caged animals set him on edge. Those familiar humans were there, flocking with concern in their eyes and questions on bated breath and Phantom still wasn’t sure if he had any kind of an answer.

He smiled politely. His lunch tray fell through his intangible hands that he shoved into his pockets. The boy-human gasped, “was that a ghost thing?”

He shrugged. He didn’t know why he needed to hide it. 

“You have ghost powers now?”

“He didn’t fall into a vat of radioactive acid, Tuck.”

“He walked into a portal, I’m pretty sure that qualifies as a superhuman origin story--”

Phantom walked through them, trying to find a new place to sit. The cafeteria had so much noise he wasn’t really sure what to do with. The clamor made his head hurt. He shuffled over to a table and sat down, like all the other regular humans, and looked around for the lecture to start. Every other room he’d entered that day had an adult who told stories. He wanted to know what this one would be about. 

“Did you see that? He just walked _through_ us. Like a ghost.” His fallen lunch tray returned to the space in front of him, though the sandwich had fallen apart and was missing a couple of key components. 

They sat on either side of him, the girl never taking her eyes form him, “but does that mean he’s dead?”

“I am alive.” Phantom said quickly, remembering the way that man had spoken about ghosts. And he was, very much definitely alive. Every bite of food made him feel hungrier--and not that hollow, empty echo of hunger that threaded the dread and distraught of a ghosts’ entire existence. He was really, actually hungry. The kind of thing that could be filled with a plate of beans. He breathed in the smells of too-much rain and little cedar blooms and fresh-cut grass. He had wholly forgotten the taste of sunlight until today, where he stood on a stoop for a full five minutes with his eyes closed, basking in the glory of morning. This is life.

There was just one problem. It wasn’t his.

Phantom closed his eyes. He had, in his entire existence from the moment that he appeared in the ghost zone, possessed one human. Doorways to the living world were rare, few and far between, but he remembered exactly what it was to thread his mind through that of a living, breathing human being. One, it came with an awareness of all bodily functions, the drum of a heartbeat the most deafening thing about it. The effort taxed him so greatly he slept in a nearby attic for a full five years after. This flesh was too comfortable, and it lacked the tell-tale struggle of one consciousness battling another. 

Perhaps he had possessed a body that already died, but not for long? Though the soul of a human is not generally something easily lost. “I barely remember yesterday, everything’s a blur,” Phantom admitted, folding his fingers in front of himself, “all I know is there’s a portal in the basement. And that’s why I’m like this.” He stared at his hands, solid, warm things. 

Was this a second chance?

Or a trick of the light?

He could be trapped in a lair, fallen through a stray door into someone else’s nightmare. But the sounds, the smells, the feeling of gravity and the solidity of earth. This is no proto-conscious echo. This is real life. He picked up his fork, stabbing at beans, a second chance is a second chance. Who would he be if he didn’t take it?

Certainly not Danny.

(Whoever that was.)


End file.
